Sweetheart, Get Me Readers

With a new TV mini-series debuting last week, everybody was talking about O.J. Simpson, the football star who fell from grace. The Times wanted in — so editors and writers quickly developed a list-like article that compiled the paper’s original coverage of the 1990s murder case, and offered it to readers on Facebook and other social media platforms.

“A lot of people were too young to read our coverage then, or wanted to refresh their memories,” Patrick LaForge, a senior editor here, told me.

Mr. LaForge, who is both steeped in Times practices and digitally savvy (he is often credited with coining the Twitter truism, “Retweets do not equal endorsements”) directs the newsroom’s Express Team. The group of eight writers and editors quickly develops articles when a topic begins gathering steam on social media.

The team also jumps on breaking news, often rewriting other news sources (with credit where due) and adding original interviews and other research even as The Times’s traditional news desks — national, business, metro or international — may still be evaluating whether an event merits dispatching a reporter.

In many cases, this results in coverage that The Times in the old days (and by that, I mean three or four years ago) would not have spent staff time on, and may not have even considered giving space to.

When Serena Williams chased down a cellphone thief, the Express Team was on it. Similarly, when Cecil the lion was killed by a dentist on safari, the team jumped in. Sometimes the articles are more serious or newsy, as when Sandra Bland’s death in a Texas jail cell captured social-media attention, or when the recent snowstorm hit the East Coast. Many of the stories appear in a right hand column on the home page that, until recently, was titled “Watching.” (It has no name at the moment.)

The team, Mr. LaForge said, is a response to a new reality: The Times can no longer just decide, high on its mountaintop, what is news. “The reader controls the news agenda much more than 30 years ago,” he told me.

Some readers object to this change, and I’ve expressed concern on their behalf. When I wrote recently about The Times’s failure to fully investigate the poisoned-water crisis in Flint, Mich., editors said they didn’t have adequate resources to do that kind of reporting. I pointed out that The Times does manage to have the resources for endless political coverage and for lighter articles, some produced by the Express Team.

One reader, Janice Ewing of Yonkers, wrote, “There is too much fluff and silliness in the so-called news.”

Another, Brian Maniere of Brooklyn, expressed what many have told me. These stories, he wrote, are “abundant on the web for free. I read the Times for information that matters.” He had a plea for Times decision makers: “Please don’t join in an ignoble race to the bottom in the pursuit of clicks.”

Mr. LaForge rejects the idea that his team produces clickbait. “Clickbait is not a useful term” here, he said. “People use it when they think something is pandering or not truly newsworthy, in the same way people used to use the term ‘tabloid,’ or say of TV news, ‘If it bleeds, it leads.’ ”

That, he emphasized, is not his team’s purpose, which is to be quickly responsive to a constantly changing — and global — online conversation.

“Some of our competitors base their business model purely on traffic,” Mr. LaForge noted. The Times, on the other hand, primarily wants to get more readers to pay for digital subscriptions — an important revenue source now that print advertising revenue has withered. So it is crucial to bring new readers to The Times, where they can discover all kinds of journalism, including foreign coverage and investigative projects.

Mr. LaForge said he was focused “on engagement, not page views.” That includes how many readers share a story, or comment on it, or how long they spend on it, and whether they go on to read other Times stories.

Dean Baquet, the executive editor, told me that the Express Team’s primary purpose is journalistic: to make The Times an early part of what people are talking about and what they care about.

“There’s an enormous international conversation going on, and we need to capture it,” he said. “Of course, there is no substitute for having reporters on the ground, but when a news story breaks, we can’t wait to make the judgment about how consequential it is before we let readers know about it.”

Mr. LaForge gave two examples of Express Team articles that he would not assign now. One was about an Ikea opening in Indiana: “In the end, we all agreed it was simply too local for us, and there was nothing significant about this particular Ikea, although the people of Indiana were pretty excited.”

Another, that he described as “too slight,” was about a parenting debate. It began: “A Facebook exchange between the owner of a Maine diner and the mother of a screaming young girl brought the wildfire capabilities of social media to a classic — and divergent — debate over parenting in public.”

I understand readers’ unease. They wonder, justifiably, if some of these stories make the best use of limited resources, and they doubt whether they are worthy of attention in The New York Times. Occasionally, I can’t help but agree: Some of this stuff has been cringe-worthy.

But much of it makes a valid contribution to the news report. And in an era when The Times has to reinvent itself to survive, experimentation is necessary. Yes, Times leadership must uphold the paper’s standards, credibility and higher purpose, but simply maintaining the status quo isn’t nearly enough these days.